AI companies aren’t only innovating to create the best models, but they’re also innovating in how to create buzz around them.
OpenAI appears to have teased GPT 5.5’s imminent release with a cryptic post on X. The OpenAI Developers account on X just shared the text “NS41” with little additional context. But eagle-eyed X users discovered that the string was ‘5.5’ in base64, which implied that OpenAI was about to launch the new model.
GPT 5.5 has also been spotted on OpenRouter, which indicates that its launch is imminent.
There has been plenty of interest around GPT 5.5. OpenAI President Greg Brockman had earlier implied that the model represented 2 years of research, so it’s likely a fresh pre-train. The model could have also been trained on the latest NVIDIA chips, which could improve performance over its predecessors. And additionally, OpenAI had delivered what seems like a step change in image capabilities with GPT-Image-2, so expectations are high from the new model.
And OpenAI has been pretty good at drumming up interest in its new releases. It pioneered the art of ‘vaugeposting’, through which researchers and employees used to drop hints about new model launches and their abilities. This was quite cleverly picked up by Google with its viral nano banana launch, and such vaugeposting is now essentially de rigueur for the industry. But OpenAI seems to be making its hints ever more obscure, with the latest one being a string in Base64. It remains to be seen how GPT 5.5 performs, but there is every indication that it’s around the corner.